Flashier Twitter apps have come and gone, but I'm still pretty enamored with Plume. One reason is that the developer (LevelUp, of Beautiful Widgets fame) is constantly rolling out new features, and today's update adds a doozie: push notifications. You should get notifications for new tweets, replies, mentions, and messages more or less instantly, and the widget and main feed can now use a "Live Stream" mode.

The service experimented with push background notifications before, but the developer wasn't satisfied with the battery-hungry feature.

Lets face it, email just isn't sexy. The Gmail app has done a lot to pretty things up, adding in fancy swiping gestures and associating pictures with each contact, but the experience is still somewhat clunky. There are alternatives, such as the stock Android app (pretty basic), K-9 Mail (the kitchen-sink approach) and Dextr (innovative, but very limited) - but all have their drawbacks. Evomail is the latest kid on the block, and it hopes to make managing email a task you actually want to do.

Despite its name, Pushover is no, well, pushover. This easy-to-use push notification service allows web services, scripts, and a bunch of other apps to send alerts to your mobile device, and when combined with a site like IFTTT, it can bend the internet to your will. Now, a year and a half after the app's debut, the Pushover team has updated the app to version 2.0, giving the app a new look and filling it up with new functionality.

Google has made a small change to the Google Calendar API that nonetheless could make a huge difference for developers and users. The Calendar API now supports push notifications - alerts sent directly to devices and apps instead of waiting for a client-side sync, a la Gmail - for updates that are practically instantaneous. The official app has had this for a while, but now third-party developers have access to this functionality, meaning that push notifications for subscribed Google Calendars can be sent to any app that supports the general Gcal API.

While the GetJar Appstore has its advantages, like GetJar Gold for example, it has been lacking one important feature that both the Android Market and Amazon Appstore have: push notification for app updates. In the past, when you downloaded an app from GetJar, the only way of knowing if the app had been updated was by going directly to that apps listing in GetJar.

This put the GetJar App Store at a clear disadvantage over other app markets, as most users aren't willing to manually check the listing for every single installed app.

Finally, after many months of waiting, the official Twitter client for Android has received an update that adds some long-awaited functionality, like push notifications and the ability to seamlessly transition between multiple accounts.

You can enable push notifications by heading into the Settings menu and tapping "automatic refresh," then selecting the type of updates that you want to notified of.

The update also brings about "a bunch of other improvements and bug fixes" according to the official Twitter blog.